A few years back I worked at a Jewish cultural organization, and from time to time we had events that called for the inclusion of a chazan, a cantor, to add a bit of religious yikhes—lineage—to our mostly secular mission. Usually this provided the workday with a pleasant musical interlude, but on one occasion the cantor seemed totally unable to carry a tune.
As we listened to him warble, I was approached by an elderly man who waved me close so he could whisper something in my ear. A Polish-born former chicken farmer from New Jersey, he had been a Nazi-killing partisan in his youth, but now walked with a cane and the stoop of age. He sounded like he’d learned English from gangster movies, which in fact he had. Hooking a thumb in the direction of the tone deaf cantor, he said, “This guy’s a chazan like I’m a dancer.”
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